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“Round’s on me,” Kent says, because he needs a minute. He needs a lot of minutes, preferably the rest of his career, but right now he needs one minute to tear his eyes away from the video of Jack kissing that guy from his college team.
On the ice. After Jack got the winning goal in the SCF, so there’s no possible way the cameras would miss a single sickening second of it. He looks so in love. The selfish fucker.
Carl’s still trying to be funny on the next stool over by the time Kent resurfaces from his grand tour of worst case scenarios, so Kent elbows him in the kidney to shut him up. Why does his entire D like to listen to itself speak? Was it a girlfriend who indulged them in their formative years? Someone must’ve thought they were interesting at some point. No one can be that tone-deaf unless they were encouraged.
“But what if he--” Carly starts again, at which point Kent shoves a hundred at him and points at the pool tables.
“Warm ‘em up,” he instructs, and pulls up his texts. They’re already piling up, so it takes him a little while to find the last reply from his lawyer.
SOS, he types, angling the screen away from his teammates. Dig up the ndas.
He goes and plays some eight-ball while he waits for the reply. His lawyer is a very polite workaholic who lives with his husband in Summerlin, so he’ll get back to Kent soon. Maybe he should change his lawyer to someone, like, straight. But what if the press finds out? And it would take ten working days to finish the transfer, and by then Kent will be either outed or digging his own grave in the press.
Fuck Jack, honestly. Heaven forbid he ever follows the rules. Heaven fucking forbid he thinks of anyone else.
Kent sinks a ball, and another. Carly, the perfect fucking idiot, is trying to take bets against him. PR has probably tweeted something suitably vague yet supportive by now. Brave on and off the ice, Kent chances, eyeing the hole diagonally across the table. He shoots. He scores, obviously.
There are twenty-eight clips of him from Juniors that could be interpreted correctly. He spent a night last year rating them from most- to least-in-love. The one that’s probably gonna run most is number three, when he was seventeen and he passed to Jack and Jack managed such a beaut of a goal that he started draft ranking predictions a year early for both of them.
Kent was still green, still freshly sunk into the swamp that is loving Jack. He breathed out and smiled at Jack’s back like he was the whole world. It was right before World Juniors, before they ever did anything; even the blind could tell how fucked he was from that one perfectly clear exhale.
A shared secret binds people for life, he thought, because Jack turned to him so smoothly it was more like pairs skate. And then Jack smiled, and Kent stopped in front of him and kissed his helmet with his eyes closed to keep the feeling in. Keep it for himself.
That’s the clip they’ll run, right after Jack kissing his twink.
“Another round?” Scraps asks, eyeing Kent. Kent jerks his chin at the bar.
“Aye aye,” Scraps says, and leaves Kent with his pile of crinkled cash and his perma-lit phone. No one’s called him yet, but the texts keep coming. His sister would’ve texted by now. Maybe even his mom.
One of the rookies is chucking up on a potted plant. Kent rolls his eyes, grabs a hundred from the edge of the pool table, and goes to pay off the waiter. Someone from PR taught him to look between people’s eyes, once upon a time. It was a good lesson.
*
His lawyer replies at midnight. He tries calling first, but since Kent’s phone has been ringing for an hour with no sign of stopping, he texted an OK instead. Twenty-eight NDAs, all lined up in case anyone gets a smart idea about making bank off Kent. Kent tells himself no one would be stupid enough to come forward.
He tries to sleep, but all he can think about is Jack and Bittle on an island somewhere. Maybe even Bob’s island on the river, where Jack kissed Kent for the last time.
Is there something in Kent that drives him to dig himself the deepest grave possible, then lie in it? It has to be genetic. There’s no other way to explain his sister’s divorce, their parents’ split, and Kent’s current problem. There’s just no way normal people live like this, up in flames, arson charges and all.
And still, hard as he tries, he can’t put himself in Bittle’s shoes, let alone Jack’s.
It’s not that fucking hard to do your job and keep your private life private. Case in point, every goddamn interview Kent had to do after Jack swallowed a fistful of benzos and left Kent to fill his shoes.
He told himself he was keeping their secret. Every day, for years and years: the one thing worth keeping. Until Jack held up his part of the deal and came back to Kent’s line. Until he was done with that fucking illegal position on a college team. Until they could get back to the one thing that mattered, and Kent could swallow his tongue until he stomached it, and they’d deal with what they did to each other in between wins.
Kent fell in love with Jack’s hands first, then his legs, then his eyes. He didn’t see the whole person until it was too late. It never occurred to him that Jack, the whole person, wouldn’t think of Kent’s hands first.
His useless fucking hands, now that Jack kissed some guy on TV and let everyone see how Kent felt about him.
*
It’s very quiet the next day when they clear their lockers. Even Kent’s As give him a berth, like he needs some space to mourn his bud’s defection to the gay side. The rookies are eyeing him like he’s about to break into a musical number announcing his (pretty obvious in hindsight) queerness.
“We’re gonna fucking demolish next season,” he tells the room at large. “I want my name on the Cup again, whatcha say?”
The room, vets and rookies and all, cheers.
The space around Kent’s bit of bench doesn’t fill. It never will, Kent knows. But he’s still captain, so of course they cheer.
*
The first bit of speculation gains traction three days later. Kent’s already cancelled his holiday in Mexico, so he reports to the rink ten minutes early with Starbucks.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks, distributing the cups. Non-fat, three shots, extra vanilla, then he sits in his chair with his extra sugar decaf. “I’m guessing it’s too late to bury it.”
“You weren’t making it easy,” the intern admits. He wilts under a glare from someone who isn’t Kent, because Kent is just drinking his coffee-adjacent drink and waiting for instructions.
“What Mac was trying to say,” a random PR voice says, “is that we’ll be dealing with this as it happens. We’ve tweeted support from your account, but we need direction for the rest of it.”
“I’m a hockey player,” Kent says. No one disputes it. “That’s all I ever wanted to be. I was young and I made some stupid faces. Make it a shallow grave, at least.”
There’s some shuffling around him. Papers and so on. Everyone in this room is some flavor of queer; Kent’s had cards and baskets sent for their special days for years.
“Shallow grave, got it,” the intern says. “We’ll do our best.”
*
Jack just kissed that boy like it was nothing. Kent should’ve known that Jack’s hippie team would fuck everything up, but maybe not to his degree.
He takes the call from his mom eventually.
“I’m not coming out,” he says, because there’s never been a wasted word between them. “The hell does anyone care?”
“Hello, Ken. Yes, I’ve been doing great. The dogs miss you. So how ‘bout that fuckup?”
“I hate him,” Kent says. They both sit with that statement for a second. Then, “How bad is it?”
“Your grandpa called,” his mom admits. “I won’t quote him, because I’m a fucking lady, but Thanksgiving is gonna be bad this year. How are you holding up?”
Kent takes stock of his hands, his knees, his core, everywhere he’s had a scalpel or a laser, every part of him that’s still aching. He drags his tongue over his three fake front teeth: two for hockey, one for his dad, may he rest in pieces.
“The league supports this unexpected Democrat turn,” he says, in the tone of voice he hasn’t let himself use since the end of their playoff run. “Everyone’s embracing this new trend of posting about wives and kids and calling it queer support.”
“Ken.”
“Sorry, Ma.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Remember when Dad came back for his car parts and everyone saw him in the garage and asked you if it wasn’t your car? And it was your car, but like, a gift for him?”
“Oh, honey.”
“It’s like that, but on TV. It’s like he escaped me or something. But the garage door can’t ever close because I didn’t lock it in the first place, and everyone's always been watching.”
“I should’ve raised you tougher,” his Ma says.
“No,” Kent says. “You should’ve made me soft. That’s what he wanted. But water and bridges and all that.”
*
A guy Kent fucked last year comes out of the woodwork with an ultimatum. Kent’s lawyer shuffles the NDAs until the full weight of Kent’s money is bearing down on the guy, so the ultimatum goes away.
“Half mil? That’s what my whole fucking life is worth?” Kent asks, six shots in. “I’m literally worth twenty times that, last I checked.”
“Your salary is an investment against future gains, sir, “ says his (gay, extremely successful) Summerlin lawyer. “Half a million was a reasonable sum with future franchise income on the line.”
“At least I don’t just fuck the pretty ones,” Kent says, bitter. “So, how are the kids?”
“Thriving,” the lawyer says, no trace of irony. It makes Kent miss his Ma, and Jack, but he refuses to think about Jack. The silence stretches; Kent goes to lie down on the warm cement edge of his pool.
“Not one word, Jim.”
“Not one word.”
His youngest starts crying in the background. Kent hangs up and tries to stop shivering, but the sunlight just isn't sinking in.
*
What do you call a closet with a glass door and a loop of you giving yourself away playing right behind it?
What do you call a door that you can’t stand to close?
You call it love, Kent thinks. You call it bad luck.
Or you call it nothing at all. You plant yourself in front of it and say it’s nothing, and eventually, even your mother stops trying to get a look. Everyone knows. You don’t have to call it anything after all.